Month: August 2005

THE SCENE: Neneh Cherry’s unification of hip-hop and energetic pop music made her an international superstar with the release of 1991’s Raw Like Sushi, but her toned-down followup, 1993’s Homebrew, was an artistic advance yet a commercial retreat. And if you’re American, that was probably the last time you heard from her.

The rest of the world, however, was privileged to receive Man in 1996, a honey-coated slab of soulful electronica. Co-written and produced by her husband Cameron McVey, it sparkles with intellect and sensuality while decimating you with hard beats and grunge guitar.

The buttery smooth strings of “Woman” move like honey just before it drips out of the container, full of sweetness and anticipation, while Cherry reaffirms her mission statement:

You gotta be fortunateYou gotta be lucky nowI was just sitting hereThinking good and badBut I’m the kinda womanThat was built to lastThey tried erasing meBut they couldn’t wipe out my past

“Hornbeam” sizzles with confidence, sailing in a sea of wordless cooing and strangled electronics, filled with the joy of pure sensual emotion, building and building, like a cocoon before it bursts.

Man does contain a massive international hit single in the Youssou N’Dour duet “7 Seconds”, its steely cool impassiveness starkly contrasts against the warmth of their voices.

Cherry shows off the swagger in her step in the trip-rock of “Kootchi”: a laundry list of the mundane things she likes about her lover:

I love the way you walk,I love the way you talkWith your mouthfulThe way you park on the sidewalkThe way you are in the carI’ll make you love the way I behaveOn my bad days

Belting this while a meteor shower of distortion rains over a military backbeat, her ability to sound demanding and vulnerable simultaneously is uncanny. Her vocal command travels down to the quiet alien calm of” Carry Me” and up to the bouncy sandpapery beat of “Together Now”. All the makings of hit record in America.

THE FALLOUT: Alas, her American record company was going through a “restructuring” in 1996 and declined to release Man, ever. It was a minor hit in the rest of the world, lovingly out of step with current music trends. Outside of guesting on other artists’ singles, Neneh Cherry has yet to record a follow-up album in the nine years since its release.

THE SCENE: What was Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate smoking in 1992? Ice started singing with the hardcore punkish Body Count, Everlast turned into the Irish Cypress Hill with House of Pain, and Divine Styler fell into the abyss with the scary-ass freakshow of Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light.

Ever hear a song and think “This is just wrong. Songs aren’t supposed to go like that. Is something in my ear?” This is a whole album of those songs, each one more disturbing and psychically damaged than the last one.

Dropping the strict hip-hop of his previous album, 1989’s Word Power, Spiral delves into psychedelic speed metal, trip-hop, Elizabethan acoustic fingerpicking and jam-band blues rock while unveiling fiendishly intricate rhymes about his Muslim faith and psychedelic drugs. What he doesn’t do exactly is rap, although every other method of vocalizing is present and accounted for.

In “Am I An Epigram for Life” he asks himself muffled metaphysical questions while swirling down the drain of keyboard bloops. The bloops return in “Touch” where he whispers his beat poetry up against a melting CasioTone preset beat, which then decays into a funk march.

It’s unsettling to listen to “Love, Lies and Lifetime Cries” as it consists mostly of him pleading “They won’t let me in!” while he frantically knocks on a closed door. I wouldn’t open it either; he doesn’t sound like someone I’d want to let in the house. But his paranoid ranting over sickly oozing keyboards is highly intriguing.

“Grey Matter” was the radio single, as if wooden flute techno jazz was going to get him spot on “Yo! MTV Raps”. His eloquence is outstanding as it is avant-garde, as he goes way out onto the microledge with “Heaven Don’t Want Me And Hell’s Afraid I’ll Take Over. He pontificates, seduces and conjoles you with his oratory skills, one step from outright screaming. He saves that for “Mystic Sheep Drink Electric Tea” a buzzy slab of industrial grindcore.

Divine Styler kicks it super-old school, kinda, with the drums-and-space of “Euphoric Rangers” then stays in outer space with “Aura” where he raps over the sounds of a malfunctioning alien probe ship.

THE FALLOUT: Divine Styler impressively wrote, produced, arranged and played most of the instruments on Spiral, but his fearlessness caught hip-hop heads completely off-guard and it bombed. Divine Styler lost his production deal, his record label and eventually his freedom (if not also his tether to the material world).

Spiral is out of print but might be available from Amazon. You can also listen to tracks below:

Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light is unabashedly psychotic but worth the effort of a complete listen.

THE SCENE: Little Axe is the nom de plume of guitarist Skip McDonald (which itself is the nom de plume of…OK I’m digressing.) He’s most famous for being the in the Sugarhill Records house band (remember “Rappers’ Delight”?), the group which eventually mutated into the sample-happy urban rockers Tackhead.

But McDonald was a bluesman at heart and in 1994 he refocused his talents to bring Delta blues into the next century with the exceptional The Wolf That House Built. Working with his Tackhead partners, McDonald wraps his taut guitar around canyon- deep bass lines, East Indian tabla drumming and atmospheric splashes of electronica to create tunes that transcend culture and time period.

The Wolf of the title refers to the classic blues man Howlin’ Wolf, who’s sampled vocals take the lead of the modern hobo song “Ride On”. Greasy and gritty, it mimics the traveling gait of a subway train strutting through the town.

The chain gang voices of “Never Turn Back” add a primordial sadness to the tabla dervish, its percussiveness chips into the song like tiny icicles. You can almost see the animals conjured from the opium smoke.

The music’s refusal to specify its genre is it’s greatest conceit. “Wake The Town” might be a traditional Pakistani wailing song until it takes a detour into Jamaican dub. Both “Out In The Rain And Cold” and “The Time Has Come” laces its American blues idioms with video game percussion; the sort of music one would hear from the bar band in a futuristic anime.

With all the heavy tech used on this album the real surprise here is the sunny “Another Sinful Day”. Consisting of just voice and jangly guitars it summons up the simple joy of making music around the campfire, which is about as rootsy as blues can get.

THE FALLOUT: Rootsy of not, Wolf flopped upon release and Little Axe found himself a new label. Five years later Moby used the same combination of transplanted blues vocals and electronics on his album Play, which became a multi-million-selling international hit album. Ah, timing is everything.

Wolf is way out of print but you can score a copy at Amazon, and you can hear tracks below:

The Wolf That House Built is a sterling example of world music done right, and its inventive exuberance is timeless.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Divine Styler loses his mind and records it for our enjoyment.

THE SCENE: Having recorded over one hundred albums in a forty year span, many of them self-released only at his concerts, Sun Ra’s entire canon defines obscure. As a turban-and-robe-wearing, Egyptology-loving outer space enthusiast, his oddball status within jazz circles kept many music fans from taking him or his music seriously. Claiming a birthplace of Saturn, he nevertheless drew attached to his adopted hometown of Birmingham, Alabama and in 1965 he recorded an homage to it entitled The Magic City.

Ra and his band the Arkestra were highly skilled swing musicians, which may explain why their transition into free jazz remains listenable. The title track, nearly half an hour in length, has a dozen movements that could serve as a miniature Sun Ra biography. It begins with a spooky buzzing that’s reminiscent of 1950s alien arrival films. A lattice of stratospheric flutes simulate the wonderment of a new civilization. One can also visualize the growth of modern industry, the vertigo of skyscrapers, the joy of walking your pet in the park, and the madness of traffic jams, all within the rising and falling of the instrumental moods.

“The Shadow World” is a night full of travel where the city never sleeps. Drums pop like oil in a skillet, horns circle like birds around a building. “The Abstract Eye”, appearing in two takes, features wonderfully expressive bowed bass that sounds not unlike the opening and closing of twenty-foot zippers.

THE FALLOUT: Barely known outside of hardcore jazz fans, The Magic City sold poorly, although massive sales were not the point of Sun Ra’s musical experiments at all. Still, many of his contemporaries borrowed his ideas, both musically (Art Ensemble of Chicago, Funkadelic) and presentationally (Earth, Wind & Fire), and received fat accolades while Ra remained a fringe artist nearly until his death in 1993.

Ironically for such an historically hard-to-find album, The Magic City is now available worldwide from such retailers as Amazon, and you can hear tracks below:

A landmark of improvisational music, The Magic City helped redirect the limits of modern composition and still sounds contemporary, forty years after its recording.

THE SCENE: In the 1980s Los Angeles fixtures Fishbone were one of the first ska-influenced bands to net a major-label deal, yet creative control was not a part of their contract. Producer David Kahne buffed and honed their more commercial songs to a pristine polish, which was a major shift from their ruggedly eccentric live material. After three years of negotiation they convinced their label that they could self-produce, resulting in 1991’s psychedelically stunning The Reality of My Surroundings.

Normally a seven-piece band, Fishbone strived for audio maximilism, cramming most songs with orchestra-level layers of Technicolor instrumentation and agressive melodicism. They sounded like a band suddenly freed from oppression, and the theme of surviving through hard times flavors every track.

“Fight The Youth” explodes with curlicues of metallic guitar set to “stun”. Instruments slash and thrust like an open pack of switchblades, daring you to approach them. This isn’t the sunny funny goofy group from 1988’s Truth And Soul. This Fishbone is politically aware and incredibly pissed off.

The inner-city fury of “So Many Millions” slams you like a newbie in a prison riot. Skittery drums anchor funky swells of sound, as if danger is rising up behind you. Gangs of vocals moan over insistent guitar solos and the song doesn’t stop as much as it passes out from all its expended energy.

The indentured servitude anthem “Housework” conjures up a mythical 1920s New Orleans juke joint, full of tinkly piano and muffled horns. Yet its continual beat changing — from old-jack swing to new-time waltz — keeps it in the now.

Control and the loss thereof haunt both the sadly melancholic “Those Days Are Gone” and the radioactive carnival ride of “Behavior Control Technician”:

Children runaway from the torturistic waysChildren still resist from the powers that persistWill you shut up and sit stillI think you should obeyHaving very few rights we cannot communicate

Train my brain to work the way you want me toDon’t question authority seeBe a little zombie that agrees with youYou are strapped with a double standard cupIn a battle you won’t winAnd when it’s over we’re gonna dance your memory away

Sheltering will restrict your baby’s mind

Over nothing but African drums, “Junkies Prayer” recites a different cracked-out poem in each ear while a gritty sample of a cheesy laugh track floats in and out of the mix. It’s both humorous and devastating, as is the entire album.

THE FALLOUT: The kinetic first single “Sunless Saturday” helped propel Reality to become Fishbone’s highest charting, largest selling and most critically beloved album. But all success is relative, and after fourteen years it has yet to reach gold status. One album later Fishbone was dropped by their label and lost half of their original members.